Gormley can't wait to prove critics wrong

He'll be watching Friday night's first instalment from the stand but it won't be long before Eddie Gormley is playing a leading role in St Patrick's Athletic's attempt to retain the Eircom National League title once again.

Last year, redeployed on the right hand side of midfield in a side reorganised by a new manager, the 30 year-old emerged as one of the lynchpins of the set up. And this time around, despite the arrival of another couple of promising youngsters who'll be eyeing up his place in the starting line up, it's hard to imagine him failing to do the same for the Richmond Park outfit.

The injuries and suspension that combined to kept him out of a handful of St Patrick's games, last season, meant that his contribution to the championship winning side was somewhat overshadowed by Paul Osam. Osam's remarkable run in the team and goal in the last league game against Cork City helped to earn him player of the year awards from both the Soccer Writers and his fellow players.

Still, it is Gormley who continues to look the most rounded and influential player in the Inchicore team, his technical skill and physical strength are complemented nicely by a distaste for defeat that occasionally borders on the obsessional.

It's this quality that has provided invaluable steel to St Patrick's during the last few, highly successful, seasons. But then it has also led to occasional problems for Gormley whose suspension this week for a sending off in the last reserve game of last year was the final, if hardly the most memorable, incident of an eventful season for him.

"I prefer not to talk about the `ball throwing incident'," he says, when a heated night in Tolka Park is mentioned. "I've just got to get on with things and I suppose you could say that I learned a lot from what happened and now I've got to apply that, the aim this year would be to get through the whole season without getting suspended . . . that's the aim anyway."

What problems he has had in the past have, however, been down almost entirely to a passionate determination to be on the winning side and that is something that neither he nor his manager would particularly like to see him shake off. "Well, I don't think anybody likes to lose but it just seems to be worse with me than with most people. If we lose on a Friday night it just ruins my weekend. Obviously that can be a bit of a problem but, at the same time, if it ever stopped being that way I wouldn't see the point, I'd probably just look at packing the whole thing in."

With that sort of attitude it's hardly surprising that the build up to the new campaign hasn't been the brightest of periods for Gormley who, along with the rest of the squad, was a little shellshocked by the scale of the Champions League qualifying round defeat by Zimbru Chisinau of Moldova. Not wanting to be remembered as the team that "got stuffed 10-nil" and "proving a thing or two" to some of the papers who the players felt dwelt a little too long on the scale of the defeat has, he says, helped to motivate the team ahead of the new campaign. However, to be fair, there's little attempt by Gormley to hide the disappointment of what must have been a terrible blow.

"It was very disappointing all right, but what it's done is made it all the more important for us to get back to that position again next summer, so we can show that we're really capable of. "Hopefully this Friday we can get going in the right direction but we know it's going to be tough. I think the squad we've got has probably improved if anything on last year but then I can't see any way that this year's league isn't going to be a good bit tighter than last season.

"Cork," he says "will be there again, Shelbourne will probably be better and Harps could well be the dark horses after bring a couple of good players in. But just because we've won it a couple of times doesn't mean we're any less hungry, we'll be looking to win it a third time. Maybe after the Moldovan game we have something to prove all over again."